Space tourism is real

Spacenews.com is running a piece which is just wrong.
Not just wrong. It's down right cynical.

Thus, even without adding all the difficulties of operating a reusable system, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that there can be no business case for space tourism. Most of the people who try to sell space tourism know this, but if you can sell a Ponzi scheme, why not space tourism?

Cynicism isn't exactly a business model, either.

For whatever reason, they've decided that the efforts of a number of commercial space companies and NASA aren't just incorrect in their assumptions about the cost of space tourism, but that it's a hoax.

The article claims that it's currently too expensive to get to orbit for the numbers to work out to profitability. As a space news outlet, notably- not a business news outlet, you'd think they would know that the commercial space companies are working hard to make the economic realities of the current space exploration a thing of the past by making rocket launches as inexpensive as possible.

In fact, the new commercial launch companies like SpaceX all have an immediate target at 1/10 the current launch cost- and they all say that's nowhere near the end goal for the bottom costs.

As a space news outlet, they should be working to help make the dreams of generations of people come true, instead of nay-saying the innovators. If they don't like what commercial space advocates are doing and feel compelled strenuously poo-poo their efforts, then they should at least attempt to do it with integrity.

You can play around with these figures, increasing the price or increasing the number of passengers in each flight, but you are still a long way from making price and cost meet.

New design

We've moved to squarespace so we can concentrate on writing and publishing awesome content instead of spending a lot of time mucking with servers. The podcast feed is being moved and will be back up in a day or two.